I received this pu-erh cake as a gift. I couldn't find any info about this cake yet.

What year is it? How much does it cost? Is it ripe? Is there anything special about the gold stamp?

Thanks,

Irwin

That cake looks like a CNNP Small Yellow Mark ripe puerh cake. This is judging by the fact that it the exact same label as some of the ones on Puerhshop.com. Take a look at the CNNP Small Yellow Mark shu cakes on Puerhshop.com or other website that has an exact photo. I think they use a variety of similar labels for that brand.

I find it odd that raw and ripe use the same wrapper and yellow mark. For CNNP, usually red is used for ripe and green for raw.

There is both sheng and shu with all wrappers (red, green and yellow).

To my knowledge, CNNP is a huge government run company which lots of factories produced pu erh for, using the CNNP wrappers until some of them were privatized. I'm not sure what the labels were supposed to indicate, but there is both sheng and shu with all labels out there.

The masses of cakes with those rather generic wrappers out there and the amount of factories using them also makes it easy to release fakes, although most fraudsters are not very smart about getting things right.